Supermarket flyers, advertisements addressed to “current resident”, catalogs you never asked for! It has started driving me up the wall!
In an effort to cut back on the waste in our family, we began recycling our junk mail! I would never have thought that you could save so much space in your kitchen garbage bag by recycling all this paper! I cut back from once a week, to once every two weeks in dumping the kitchen garbage.
But at the same time, we are still often just bringing in the mail and disposing of it immediately in the recycling bins. The question begs to be asked…is this the best way to be good stewards of the earth that the Lord has entrusted to our care? How can we cut this stream of junk mail at the source?
Here are a few options:
1. Register for the Direct Marketing Association’s Mail Preference Service. It costs $1 (only if you mail in, online is free with the provision of a CC to confirm identity, but they do not charge it), and it will stop commerical mail from companies that you don’t already do business with.
2. Email your full name and current address to the Abacus Catalog Alliance ([email protected]), which will take you off the list of its members.
3. Sign up for OptOutPrescreen, which will stop prescreened credit-card offers.
4. Sign the Do Not Mail Registry, a petition to stop junk mail.
4. Lastly, you will still have stragglers to which you will have to give a ring! Hang onto these throughout the week and make a once a week call to the company’s toll-free number. It works! We have been receiving unnecessary gift receipts for our monthly giving to different organizations. I would rather these costs of printing be cut back and used for more effective use. So I called them and just asked for a annual statement for tax purposes. They were more than happy to change this for me.
It may take a few months to notice a difference, but I want to make an effort to cut back on all this junk!
We have stickers for that in Holland! You either put a no/yes or a no/no sticker on your mailbox and the postman stops putting in flyers and local ‘news’papers. (No/yes means no flyers, yes to the papers)
I can’t believe it hasn’t been used in other parts of the world as well
Greetings from the netherlands!
Use those prepaid envelopes that come with the credit card offers to evangelize! Pop a Gospel tract in and send it off. Kind of makes you not mind the junk mail so much sometimes! : ) (Stop the catalogues though!)
It’s been a week since I became a victim of compromised identity. (meaning, my identity wasn’t stolen, but very compromised)
I’ve been advocating people going to anyone who has their ss# and asking how they store that information. In my case it was a former employer who was transporting computer tapes to another location, and the tapes were “lost”.
The numerous letters I sent one was to TransUnion for elimination of credit card offers. My husband and I both have excellent credit, and have worked hard over the years to maintain it.
I encourage anyone who wants to secure their identity, and trust me ANYONE can get their identity stolen. The stats are 1 in FIVE families someone will have their identity stolen.
My husband and I signed up for http://www.trusedid.com Not the cheapest, but who can put a price tag on their identity
Here’s what I do to stop all of those credit card offers from coming: open the mail and tear up the papers inside into fairly small pieces, stuff it all into the prepaid envelope and send it back to them. You won’t be hearing from them again.
thanks for this helpful info- i’ve also been troubled by all the junk we didn’t sign up for- thanks again
Thanks, Lindsay, for the resources. These are things I need to do.
Trying to stop all of the junk mail has been on my to do list for a while now and always gets pushed off.
Thanks for the reminder and for doing a good share of the leg work.
I appreciate it!